Fractal Vision
by Empatheia
Summary: -Shino- Hope is an involuntary reflex.


**A/N: **Written for the March round of Naruto flashfics on LiveJournal. A bit creepy, but hey, it's Shino. He needs more love.

Enjoy!

**xxxxx**

_**Fractal Vision**_

**xxxxx**

Everyone asked him eventually... but they only did it once.

They fidgeted, danced around the subject, pretended it didn't bother them, but given long enough they all eventually gave in. Human conversation was based around eye contact. Without it they felt vulnerable, as though speaking to someone they couldn't see. It didn't matter that he was standing right in front of them. If they couldn't see his eyes, it was like he was invisible.

_I can't see you, so you can't see me!_

"Why do you wear those glasses, Shino-kun?"

Sakura had known him all of five minutes. It was their first day of classes. She'd only just learned his name. He could tell, though, that she was one of those children who had never learned to exercise caution when asking questions of other people.

Questions, you see, had answers.

"Because they are necessary," he told her flatly, hoping she wouldn't press further.

(He knew better, of course, but hope is an involuntary reflex.)

She frowned. "What for? They're so dark, you probably can't even see properly through them. If you have bad eyes you should wear clear glasses like Mommy's."

Shino feels his spine tighten, braces himself. It's always been this way, it happens all the time, but somehow it's never gotten easier. "I do not have bad eyes," he told, praying futilely one last time that she would simply drop it.

The Aburame clan has never relied on luck, or prayer. That is because they have none of the former, and the latter never works.

"Well, you're not blind," she mused, "you seem to get around just fine. So if you're not blind and your eyes aren't bad, why do you need glasses?"

Her face fractured in his vision into shards of pink and peach and pale peridot green, trembled, reformed. He hardly noticed. It was simply a side-effect. "It is... not a pleasant reason," he warned her, knowing as he had known all the other times that it would do no good.

She smiled brightly. "It's all right, I'm pretty tough," she said boastfully. "Come on, Shino-kun, let me see!"

A resigned sigh, another memory to class with all the others. Shino reached up and took his glasses off.

He heard her scream before she let it out, knowing its pitch and timbre already from countless previous experiences. She dropped to the floor as her knees betrayed her and stared upwards, eyes fixed wide with horror and mouth trembling. The skin of her face was dead white, like a plaster imitation mask, something breakable and already crumbling. "You-- how can you-- how do you-- with _that?_"

He smiled, sad and resigned. A bug dropped out of his left socket, scuttled back up his cheek to rejoin its kin. "Oh, I can see," he reassured her. "I can see you... I can see everything. Probably better than you can."

There were tears, trickling down her plaster-cast face.

Pity.

It was not an unusual reaction. Not his favourite, either, but better that some. At least she wasn't calling him a monster and _meaning_ it. Some of them had. Some of them, older and more eloquent, had found even worse words. Most of them ran-- not always right away in a rush of frightened feet, but day by day they distanced themselves until the gap between them and the terror he carried was large enough for them to breathe in.

This was simply what it meant to be an Aburame, no more, no less.

The insects were neither a gift nor a curse to him. They had been with him since birth-- it would be like thinking of having hair on one's head as a curse, or having fingers, or eyes.

And indeed, the insects served much the same to him as the latter two. They had eaten his eyes as a symbol of the contract. Without them he was blind. And as an ongoing trade and payment, they devoured most of his chakra every day, in return submitting to his orders in battle and whenever necessary. They were part of him, but also separate allies requiring compensation for their efforts on his behalf.

Were he ever to lose them, for any reason... the tunnels they dug through his flesh would collapse and clog with matter, effectively paralyzing him. At the same time, his reservoir of chakra would fill and fill to points it had never reached before without the insects to drink it away, and he would be tormented by chakra poisoning until an alternate purging method could be found.

The bugs saw for him, moved for him, made up a goodly portion of his body mass.

Without them he would be a sightless, broken shell.

With them he was a pariah.

It was a risk the Aburame family had deemed worth taking decades ago, and Shino had inherited that choice. He was not resentful of this. There was nothing he could about it even if he were. The bugs were part of him, and exorcising them from him would cost him far more than they had ever asked.

This, though... the predictable reaction whenever people asked him why he wore his great black glasses and when he answered their question (because questions should have answers, it is logical and right, and logic must be obeyed even when it hurts) he has never truly managed to accept. Every single time, it wounds him a little in a way that no amount of healing jutsu or bed rest could ever fix.

Just once he wished someone would be able to accept what they see without revulsion _or_ pity. He wished someone would simply engage him in conversation about the mechanics of fractal vision and its implications in his life and pretend nothing at all was wrong or painful or disgusting about what had been chosen for him.

Just once, he wished for someone willing to touch him for reasons other than medical. He feels like a weakling, more childish and vulnerable than usual, when he sees friends and teammates sling arms around each other in easy displays of camaraderie. The closest anyone will come to doing that with him is clapping him on the back or shoulder, and they never let their hands linger for longer than the moment it takes to make contact.

Just once he wished being an Aburame meant something other than unspoken but unbreakable exile.

Just once.

It had not happened yet, and Shino held out little hope that it ever would. It was simply a fact of existence that people like him had lonely, short lives spent mostly on the battlefield. He knew someday he would come to terms with this and it would not longer cause him pain.

Today was not that day, however.

He stared impassively down at Sakura where she still sat shaking on the floor. Guilt at the cruelty of her reaction was written all over her face, but she couldn't seem to find the words big enough to cover what she felt.

That was all right. It wasn't like he blamed her.

The glasses settled back into place without a sound, cool and reassuring against his face. A shield of glass against an arsenal of words and expressions... flimsy, but effective enough in its own way.

Shino had no friends. He had glasses, and he had allies, but not friends.

xxxxx

_Later, there would be a stammering girl who was afraid of everything and a brash boy who was afraid of nothing who would change that, but it was not given to him to know that._

_It is not given to _any _mortal to know whether it is salvation or condemnation that comes for them._

_Aburame Shino knew not to expect either, and learned to be content._

**XxxxxxX**

**A/N: **Partial credit for some of the ideas in this fic and one of the lines goes to the ever-wonderful **Aiffe**, who despite not having read the series, somehow had great insight into Shino's character. Much love to her for all her help.

So. What do you think? Is our theory right? :)


End file.
